Happy Birthday to me! - Cricut Maker and Foil Quill

On Wednesday, 12 Feb, it was my birthday. My sweetie has been listening to me pining for a Cricut Maker for months, many months, since it first came out. So... he decided to surprise me and get me one. And it is a pretty blue and white (he knows I am not fond of pink, thankfully).

We picked it up at out mail agent in Blaine, Washington (cheaper and quicker shipping to a US location) along with a few other packages and then went on to Bellingham for a little shopping.

I spent a little time in Tuesday Morning and found the Foil Quill (in almost the same blue!) another thing I have been wanting since I saw it last year and helped fuel my desire for a digital cutter.

Unboxing!

I had to find a spot for the new toy. I moved my guillotine and heat tools off the top of my basket drawers. I eventually had to move my backgrounds box, too, for the USB cable to reach my computer on the other side of my desk.

The first thing out of the box is the friendly getting started box. (Doncha love my messy desk?)

The Maker was double wrapped in squishy foamy wrapping and shrink wrap. The foamy I can understand to keep it from dings, but the shrink wrap is just extra plastic packaging :(

Inside the getting started box was a CD shaped "Open me first" envelope. I rolled my eyes for a moment thinking they had put a CD in the box, but... it was a series of 4 cards with 4 exceptionally easy steps.

And... drum roll... my very first cut! I used the starter pack while following the directions for setup and all.

I've been spending some time figuring out how to use the Maker and Foil Quill, especially in conjunction with my own collection of image files and supplies. I even already have some vinyl in my stash for die-cutting with my much-loved steel-rule dies (but now I want more more more *laugh*). I don't have the knife blade yet (but Cricut has a sale this week *laugh*) so I am limited to shallower cuts until I get it.

From my own experimenting already, I have ideas brewing in my head and posts (and possibly videos) to make. I did get some bumps toward a head start by a fellow crafter in the Kraftin' Kimmie Friends group ('cause I was bubbling over with "squee" and had to tell someone so I made a post there) and that got me leaping ahead like a gazelle. In addition to the Cricut Design Space, I'm also going to be learning Inkscape which is remarkably like Illustrator but it's been a few years since I worked with Illustrator so I am rather rusty on it.

Inkscape is to Illustrator as Gimp is to Photoshop. They're open-source (Free!) full-featured applications. They have features very very similar to the Adobe products but enough differences in the controls that if you're used to the Adobe ones the controls might trip you up a bit (which is why I struggle with Gimp, it's just enough not Photoshop to frustrate me 'cause I don't have the knowledge of how it does the same thing differently and don't use it often enough to remember). But FREE is great for my computer upstairs. (I have an OLD copy of Photoshop and Illustrator and a few others I bought several years ago, CS4 *laugh*)

Inkscape
Gimp

And now I am off to a fabric store... Happily, as part of the room swap I did last year, my sewing machine is actually in a usable location. One of the reasons I wanted the Maker is because of the rotary blade to cut fabric :)

Side Note: I still love my Big Shot and will be using it, too. The Maker and Big Shot do different things, really, in different ways.

Other side note: The Cricut limitation that vexes me (and I couldn't get an answer on before I got one) is that there is no built-in way to do cuts on stamped images and no way to 'grow' an imported image for a cut line. The Print and Cut feature is handy and does, I think, do a margin automatically, but no control over how much of a margin. Thus the need for Inkscape/Illustrator and Gimp/Photoshop and even an external scanner (which I have, if it works -- I haven't tried the one on my printer and my external one finally died after more than a decade in service).

Supplies